America’s Public School System: Creating Aliens Through Alienation

"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way."
Doris Lessing

There are still many factories in the US that have not dissolved away only to reappear in foreign lands. These factories, however, go by another, less mechanistic name: Public Schools. It could change, however, in the blink of an eye if we can agree to abandon the factory model of education.

Ted Sizer, founder of the Coalition for Essential Schools says,

"To teach students well, obviously, we have to know each one well. For us in the Coalition, that means that the total,  consistent student "load" per teacher has to be fewer than eighty in secondary schools and twenty in elementary  schools; and each student has to be with us for more than a few months. All else flows from that ratio and stability. In  most schools that means a program focused on the essentials, beginning with literacy, numeracy, and civic understanding and  moving on from there."

That is commonly not the case, though.  Many urban and rural schools are confronting student daily loads of 100, 150, or more.  Like the Giant Combine in Ken Kesey’s book, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, this strained condition- present within far too many schools- is grinding down teachers and students alike.  The current emphasis on productivity-based education has stifled the field, creating far too many negative returns to justify whatever successes there have also been.

Think of your idea of a classic farm setting.  Then visit your nearest animal feedlot.  That is what public education has become.

And so many of us protest, and make fine, reasoned arguments about the situation.  But what really gets me is how many other people are ok with the school-as-feedlot model of public education.  

Words like “alienation” and “indoctrination”, once part of the language of progressive educators trying to empower children, are now commonly used by the dominant society in their efforts to maintain their hold on power.  Even the term, “empowerment”, is finding itself appropriated by the mainstream status quo as is found in this example:

“Current trends and innovations in middle school mathematics encourage students to become the quantitative thinkers that educators want them to be. The goals of these new movements are to enhance students' critical, creative, and logical problem-solving abilities, to increase their chances for succeeding in higher-level mathematics, and to prepare them for life experiences with mathematics.”

The title of the article from which this quote was taken is- what? “Middle school mathematics: student empowerment through quality innovations.”

As a math teacher I can see how children are empowered by math.  But the way the word is used in the above quote places intrinsic learning into the passive voice.  What's so empowering about that?   I am slowly seeing now how the progressive educators’ language of change is co-opted by the power elite.  This marginalization of meaningful reform mirrors (alliteratively) what has been happening to the Left for the past, oh...., 30 years or so.  What remains for the voice of the disempowered, then, seems to be the ever-stronger words of revolution.  The logical conclusion:  only a revolution- in thinking, or in actions- can effect positive empowerment for those who lack any.

The dominant society knows this, and are building prisons at a feverish pace, even as record numbers of non-violent offenders- including growing numbers of peaceful protestors- are already in jail.  This is why liberals are struggling for change.

“A person's freedom of learning is part of his freedom of thought, even more basic than his freedom of speech. If we take form someone his right to decide what he will be curious about, we destroy his freedom of thought. We say, in effect, you must think not about what interests and concerns you, but about what interests and concerns us.”

John Holt

Few responsible persons in educational leadership positions are currently trying to mediate the gross conflicts of interest among the parties in public education today.  The administrators are mainly interested in smoothing things out, and implementing directives from their higher-ups.  Teachers are interested in maintaining order in the midst of total or near-total dysfunction, as well as affording financially to continue as being teachers.  Parents are torn between seeing that their kids are getting the best education, and bearing the burden of paying for that education.

Voila!  The system defaults to the Hidden Curriculum that nobody but Cylons and Fascists wanted in the first place, helped along nicely by BushCo.

Meanwhile, children, just interested in growing up happy and loved, face daily exploitation of their very lives, with little to say about it.

From an affective perspective, there are some serious emotional consequences to this tangle of negligence and despair.  The same seven deadly sins that afflict the world at large are also besetting our children in school.

“Alienation is produced in the classroom, when the administration determines the curriculum and the mode of learning.  Students are expected to conform and to listen, but neither their voices, nor more importantly their feelings, are heard.   By the time the student becomes an adolescent, he has often developed a deep distrust of other people and their motives, and has lost touch with his sense of self.”

Shaun Kerry, M.D.

Diplomate, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology

Years ago, John Holt questioned how a strong, growing society that still had poverty, racism, and all the other ills of 60s America would do any better after the nest round of growth.  Well, here it is, 40 years after he and others pointed out the social follies we were committing, and what have we accomplished?  Despite a huge creation of wealth over four decades, America is still grappling with its ills, living fiscal year to fiscal year, mortgaging its descendants’ futures, even eating its seed corn.  From space, we look little different from bees in a hive, or ants in an anthill.

Somebody said that the raison d’etre of tyrants to rob people of their freedom is always given to the people as a pressing need upon which their very survival depends.  We have to do this; we have to do that; we have to do the other.  Any psychologist deconstructing the emotional baggage behind such assertions from already-dominant parties would call them  “emotionally needy” to a pathological degree.

But these are supposedly mature adults leading us!  Clearly, maturity transcends age.  So reality shows us once again that the true emotionally needy people in this world are children and Captains.  Immature, growing, learning children.  And mature, stifled, groping-in-fear Captains.  Unfortunately, few children are maturing much themselves these days.  How can they, spending every day in a nation- and a school system- run by selfish emotionally-deficient idiots?

Which brings us to the federal No Child Left Behind Act.  Created in a crucible of fear, NCLB is now “producing” EXACTLY the kind of children with the qualities that it was designed to avoid sending out into the world:  poorly prepared, insecure, reality-deficient, fearful of authoritarianism, disempowered, common sense deprived, immature young adults.  Perfect hosts for bigotry, apathy, reactionary-mindedness, and- of course- emotional neediness.  NCLB has sadly perpetuated the very cycle it was designed to stop, and which so many past progressive educators sweated blood to end as they shouldered the karmic wheel of- well- progress.

NCLB must be changed.  There are many, many clear and progressive voices out there whose time has come to be heard.  Leadership into the dark, often windowless, alienating, disempowered, stifling, degrading, undignified, exploited, and disgusting shell of a system that public education has become must change now.  Whoever it was that brought this grey goo of a nationalized public institution has had their chance to remake the system in their own image.  They played God with peoples’ lives- and to what end?  In the end, all they have done is prove they are not capable of reinventing the wheel.  What an expensive way to learn this lesson!

Orality stresses group learning, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility.... Print stresses individualized learning, competition, and personal autonomy. Over four centuries, teachers, while emphasizing print, have allowed orality its place in the classroom, and have therefore achieved a kind of pedagogical peace between these two forms of learning, so that what is valuable in each can be maximized. Now comes the computer, carrying anew the banner of private learning and individual problem-solving. Will the widespread use of computers in the classroom defeat once and for all the claims of communal speech? Will the computer raise egocentrism to the status of a virtue?”

-Neil Postman

Can anyone deny that what has been missing in today’s federalized public education is the local communities’ standards and flavor?

Let us look at NCLB Republican Style as it really has been:  a move on the part of the Right to marginalize the education professionals, twice as many of whom are Democrats than Republicans (though I’ve heard it’s as high as 90% Democrat at the university level).

All the countless insidious divide-and-conquer tricks these ideologists used against the teachers, as well as the economic maneuvers designed to both favor their own children and enrich themselves financially at the expense of others’ children succeeded in wreaking havoc.  Literally years- entire careers’ worths of slowly-made gains in building trust and raising the maturity levels of kids were lost.  If only it were just a bad dream, but it’s not.  And, just like in Iraq today, it may be too late to turn around.

Politicians:  Please listen to reason and change NCLB before it completely ruins public education.  Policy-makers:  Renew your basic vision of an equal and free education for all.  Fellow citizens:  Come to embrace the idea of social justice in all its cultural diversity.  Pretty please, with sanity on top?